Edge of Glass Read online

  The reaction was quicker than I had expected. He stared for a few seconds, as if to make sure it was I; then he slammed down his glass on the bar, and pushed through the group, jostling them rudely, paying no attention to the protests, offering no apology. But instead of coming towards me, as I expected, he headed for the door. With the welcoming smile still fixed on my face, I watched in utter disbelief as the outer door swung open and closed again, giving a glimpse of the rainy street.

  I was on my feet at once, clumsily jolting the table so that Claude’s attention was forced back to me.

  ‘Maura …’

  I snatched up my coat and handbag. ‘I’ll ring you tomorrow ‒ all right?’ I was shouldering myself through the crowd, and then I was out on the street, searching for him.

  He wasn’t anywhere in sight. I was standing there, foolish and empty, not knowing why I had run after him. I buttoned my coat and started to walk home.

  III

  Before I went to sleep that night I re-read the letter from Lloyd Justin ‒ the California letter that had come that morning, the sun-bright letter, the new house and swimming-pool letter, the young research engineer letter, trying not to be too smug about the good life, trying not to be too pleased because he had left another kind of life and another kind of climate behind in England. Last summer Lloyd Justin had wanted me to marry him and come with him when he took up his job with one of the giant aircraft manufacturers in Southern California. I had hesitated, and had not given an answer, feeling that the basis of a marriage had to be something much more compelling than what I felt about Lloyd, or, up to this moment, about any other man. My lack of an answer had made him angry, but that was the time when I found out the nature and the future of Blanche’s illness. Everything had seemed to come to a standstill; I had told Lloyd that the lack of an answer didn’t matter, because I would not leave Blanche. It had been a tactless, perhaps a stupid way to tell him; he had gone away hurt as well as angry, and I had heard nothing from him. I missed him, and I might have regretted the sharpness of the break, but for the fact that concern over Blanche and a rash of jobs that Claude had promoted for me gave me little time for what might have been pondering. Now, through a mutual friend he had learned of Blanche’s death, and this morning’s letter had arrived asking me to come, offering me the life in the sun. I found that I was no more sure than I had been last summer.

  Once I had talked with Blanche about marriage ‒ before I had known Lloyd. I remembered the careful way she had felt for her words. ‘I think the marriage worth making won’t be something you have to decide about. You won’t be able to imagine doing anything else.’ That was where my doubting lay; it was still quite possible to go on imagining myself not married to Lloyd.

  My thoughts were of Lloyd and Blanche as I drifted into sleep, but when I dreamed, it was a dream in which once again I twirled and pirouetted in the autumn woods, but now I wore the fantasy clothes designed for Peter Latch’s girl in the film. And suddenly the Sheridan man was there also, holding the Culloden Cup, extended towards me so that the slanting shaft of sun struck it, lighting it to radiance. Then a wind blew, and my wispy clothes streamed behind me like banners; the sun was gone; I shivered; the man and the Cup both were gone, lost in the wet woods.

  When I woke the Saturday dawn was chill and damp and the eiderdown lay on the floor.

  Two

  It was later than I had intended on that Saturday evening when I got back to the shop in King’s Road, my mind full of the things yet to do before I got the air-ferry from Lydd to France early the next morning. Mary Hughes had said she would wait for me, though; we would eat supper together and go through the bills and anything else that might need a decision while I was away. There wouldn’t be very much; Mary had always been very efficient. Blanche had said she was the businesswoman of the two, but they both knew that Blanche’s eye for furniture had been finer and truer. There never had been any worry in leaving the shop in Mary’s hands; I expected none now. The fact that all the lights were still on, even though it was after seven o’clock, didn’t worry me either. Like Blanche, I wasn’t of a particularly economical turn of mind.

  It was only when I walked up to the door and saw the uniformed policeman standing inside as if on guard that I realised that the squad car at the kerb had business there ‒ business that concerned me.

  The constable opened the door in response to my gesture. ‘I’m Maura D’Arcy. Is there something wrong?’

  ‘You’d better speak to the Sergeant, Miss.’

  The sound of our voices had reached the back of the shop. Mary was there, talking with the two men. They turned as I approached.

  ‘Oh ‒ Maura!’ Mary looked distracted. She had a streak of dust across the front of her dress, and her wiry grey hair stood about her face in an untidy fuzz. ‘This is Detective-Sergeant Kerr.’

  ‘How do you do, Miss D’Arcy ‒ my assistant, Saunders.’

  I acknowledged the introductions with a nod, but spoke to Mary. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Mary gestured helplessly; she was seldom helpless or distracted. ‘Oh, some unpleasantness. I think something’s been stolen ‒ but I don’t know what.’

  As I frowned, she gestured. ‘Back here ‒ come and look. Perhaps you’ll know if there’s anything missing. Goodness knows, I should know, but I’ve never handled anything from this cabinet, and I can’t remember exactly what was there. I’ve explained to Sergeant Kerr about the way Blanche and I worked …’ As she spoke she was leading us all to the back of the shop. I guessed where we would end, and we did.

  ‘Look …’ she pointed to the cabinet on the wall beside Blanche’s desk.

  The cut in the glass was so neat it wasn’t immediately obvious. Both doors of the cabinet were closed; only the lack of reflection of a small area around the latch on the right-hand door would make one look closer. A semicircle of glass, just big enough to permit the passage of a hand had been cut and lifted away; with the glass gone the latch could be easily opened, and it had been. Even my first quick check of the pieces crammed on the dusty shelves told me what was missing.

  ‘Who did it?’

  Mary repeated her gesture of bewilderment. ‘I don’t know. It could have been any number of people. The shop was crowded all afternoon, with people all over the place.’ Her voice faltered. ‘I’m awfully sorry, Maura. But you know how it is … Saturday afternoons … There were dozens of people all asking me questions and prices … and it’s so easy for someone to come back here while I’m at the front of the shop, and you know you just can’t see if someone’s back here.’

  I nodded. ‘I know … it’s really my fault for not being here. You shouldn’t have to cope alone on Saturdays …’

  Kerr grew impatient of our exchange. ‘Could you tell us, Miss D’Arcy, what is missing, if anything?’

  Like Mary, I shrugged helplessly. ‘Antiques really aren’t my business. It was my mother …’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Mrs. Hughes has explained that. What we’d like to know is if you can identify any object as definitely being missing from the cabinet ‒ or any other place in the shop.’ Now it was his turn to look rather helplessly at the hundreds of items spread down the length of the room. ‘Mrs. Hughes,’ he added, ‘says she isn’t familiar with the contents of the cabinet.’

  Mary went quickly to her own defence. ‘Well, I’ve told you, Sergeant, that the things in the cabinet weren’t for sale. Blanche ‒ Mrs. D’Arcy ‒ just had her own little collection of old glass. But she never made any particular fuss about it, so I can’t tick off each piece she had. Well, I mean …’

  ‘Quite so, Mrs. Hughes. And you, Miss D’Arcy?’

  I had been looking at the shelves again. There was no reason not to tell him. I wondered why I felt so reluctant. ‘I remember one piece that should be here that isn’t here now.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘An eighteenth century goblet ‒ Sheridan, engraved, air-twist stem and two handles, rather elaborate.’ Sa
unders was writing down what I said; perhaps it was the sight of the words being recorded that stopped me. I didn’t say anything more about the glass, nothing about the particular kind of engraving, or what the intertwined flowers of the handles had represented. Let Mary add that, if she knew.

  It seemed she didn’t; no other information was offered beyond her saying quickly. ‘Well, all the glass in there is Sheridan. It was Blanche’s hobby. I thought I told you that, Sergeant.’

  ‘No,’ he said patiently. ‘No, you didn’t, Mrs. Hughes. Anything else, Miss D’Arcy?’

  ‘Nothing that I can remember now,’ I pointed to the empty semi-circle. ‘Wouldn’t this be rather difficult to do, Inspector, in a shop crowded with people?’

  ‘Not necessarily. The pane is simply gripped with a rubber suction-cap and held while the glass is cut. A routine operation for a certain kind of burglar, I’m afraid.’

  Mary gave a loud snort. ‘Not very routine to come into a crowded shop and do it.’

  ‘No,’ he admitted, as if he didn’t like to admit anything. ‘It is not routine, Mrs. Hughes. This thief seems to have been very selective. Could you put a value on this ‒ er ‒ goblet, Miss D’Arcy?’

  I appealed to Mary, and she answered for me, making certain that Blanche’s collection wasn’t underrated. ‘I’m quite sure that the least of the pieces wouldn’t have gone for less than twenty guineas ‒ many of them are worth considerably more than that, I’d say. Good eighteenth century glass is getting quite rare. But this piece …’ she shook her head. ‘None of them were for sale, so we had never priced them.’

  I half turned away, as if examining the rest of the pieces in the cabinet, and I said nothing. I said nothing at all about what I knew of the Culloden Cup, nothing of its rarity, nothing about it being unique. I knew who had it, of course ‒ or who had caused it to be taken. I also knew that he wasn’t a thief. If he had insisted, I might have sold him the Cup for seventy guineas; he hadn’t had to tell me what its real value might be. I stared at the neat, empty circle; it seemed provocative in a way, mocking me, tantalising, compelling my attention the way the smashing of the little vase had done. He was mad, of course, and the goblet should be taken away from him, but for some reason he didn’t expect it to be taken away. He didn’t expect me to act as I should act; he didn’t expect me to turn to the Sergeant and tell him what I remembered of a strange man, tall, with an Irish accent, very good-looking, a man whom I believed had deliberately destroyed a little Sheridan vase. I didn’t fear the same fate for the Culloden Cup. I could recall those hands as he had examined it, careful, knowing, almost reverent. I did not think he would destroy it, but if he had meant to do that, the deed was done already. I remembered also those odd questions he had asked me about Blanche and about my father. He meant to say something to me through the taking of Blanche’s goblet. The act was not completed; the conviction was growing in me that I would hear from him again.

  Then why, if this were so, had he not merely cut me in the White Hart last evening, but had actually fled from me? It was too much for me; I was confused and unhappy, wondering what Blanche would have done about this strange man with the face of an angel, and the scarred hands.

  I hung back while Mary did a slow tour of the shop with the Sergeant, trying to determine if any other items were missing. It didn’t surprise me that she found none. Saunders was at my elbow, still with his notebook out, but his attention wasn’t entirely on his superior. I sensed him hovering, the way one does, and I turned to look at him, the first time I had really looked at him.

  I met at once a sheepish smile. He was young; he didn’t seem much older than I was, and was therefore young; to be what he was. ‘Thought I recognised you,’ he said.

  ‘Recognised me?’ Why did I feel guilty because an officer of the law recognised me? ‒ what had I done?

  ‘You’re the girl in the Marsh’s chocolate ad, aren’t you?’

  I nodded, relieved.

  ‘Smashing, I thought,’ he added. I wondered if he meant the chocolates. ‘I thought you looked smashing ‒ but they didn’t do you justice.’

  Absurdly, I felt myself blush. Funny how this unsought compliment from an unexpected source reassured me. It was so normal. I was the girl in a chocolate ad, and to him I looked as wholesome as the chocolates I helped to sell. It was all very far from the world of Claude and Wild and Peter Latch; it was a simpler world where a young man would snatch a minute from being an officer of the law to say what he felt in an absolutely straightforward way. It couldn’t last, but it was wonderful. Mary and the Sergeant had finally reached the door. Saunders made to move towards them; he half turned back to me. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you again …?’

  I hope my smile didn’t encourage him too much; it wasn’t going to happen, and we both knew it. For him I would go on being the girl in the chocolate ad; for myself, I had gone too far in the world where a girl’s smile was simply something with which to sell chocolates. But it was nice that it had happened.

  The Sergeant was telling Mary that if she discovered any other items missing, she was to telephone; they would be in touch, he said, if they turned anything up. He didn’t sound very hopeful. It was a minor crime, the theft of one eighteenth-century goblet, whose value might have been between twenty and thirty guineas. The only thing to give the crime interest was the manner of its execution, the single-mindedness of the thief’s objective, his indifference to any other thing in the shop. ‘Sounds like a collector to me,’ the Sergeant observed, a little more unbending now that the routine was dispensed with. ‘We do get this kind of thing from time to time, you know ‒ cranks who have a mania for a particular thing, and who just have to have it whether they can afford it or not. Awfully difficult to find them, though. You see, they never steal for profit, just for the joy of possession. They never attempt to get rid of it to a fence ‒ just lock it away and gloat over it in private. Our usual channels are useless when we are up against a type like that.’ He seemed now to be appealing for some understanding, as if his job was much harder than people believed. ‘We’re much better equipped for dealing with the professional than the amateur, you see.’

  ‘But all the same,’ Mary said, after I had poured two Scotchs in the kitchen upstairs and began the preparations for the meal, ‘I think that’s rather feeble. Of course, when they couldn’t find two million pounds after the Great Train Robbery, I don’t know what we can expect them to do about a single goblet. They’ll put out a description and that will be that! But it’s still a valuable piece of glass, and I think it’s a shame someone can just walk into a shop and do what he did … Blanche would be furious …’

  I made murmured inconsequential replies as I assembled the things I needed for poached eggs with cheese fondue ‒ the mushrooms on which they would sit prepared for grilling, the marvellous smell of minced shallot and garlic making me pleasantly hungry, giving the Swiss cheese to Mary to grate, measuring the vermouth. I did all this with my eyes going frequently to Blanche’s recipe book, and my mind still pondering the problem of the Culloden Cup. I very much doubted, as Mary had said, that Blanche would have been furious; I thought her feelings might have been much less simple than that. I was beginning to sense that some relationship existed, or had existed between Blanche and the young man, and its key lay in the Culloden Cup ‒ or perhaps in Sheridan glass. I began to add the wine and stock to the mixture, wondering why, then, the man had said he had never known Blanche. As the cream and the cornflour went in I thought that he wasn’t old enough to have known Blanche well when she lived in Ireland ‒ he would have been a young child at that time. I grew impatient as I realised that I very likely never would have the answer to these questions unless the man reappeared and volunteered them; at the same time I grew reckless with the cream and cheese.

  ‘How do you do it?’ Mary said, watching the process.

  ‘Blanche showed me. Well, I don’t have to tell you ‒ she was a far better cook than I’ll ever be.’

 
‘No ‒ I mean how do you eat such things and still not get too fat for modelling? Now me …’

  ‘I eat lean all week so that I can have two fat meals.’ I set the mushrooms to grill, and began to poach the eggs. ‘I expect I’ll have to stop when I’m twenty-five ‒ they say that’s when you start to put on weight.’

  ‘Blanche didn’t.’

  ‘No ‒ but then I’ll never look like Blanche, either. She was …’ I didn’t know what words to use for Blanche. The lines of her fine, lean body had been indestructible; she had been beautiful.

  We ate the eggs almost in silence, appreciatively, and then I brought out the brie which had come to the precise stage of ripeness. With it was the freshly ground Blue Mountain coffee which was an extravagance I had inherited from Blanche. I needed courage, so I poured two brandies. Mary’s eyebrows lifted a little, but she said nothing, just produced her cigarettes.

  ‘Mary, can you remember a certain man in the shop this afternoon …?’

  I didn’t make a very good job of the description, but he wasn’t someone easy to overlook or to forget.

  She began nodding her head almost at once. ‘He was there, all right. He bought an ivory letter-opener. Big, fantastically good-looking, Irish … I remember the accent. Why?’

  I told her about the Culloden Cup and watched the incredulity and dismay grow on her face.

  ‘But, my God, Maura, it must be worth thousands!’

  ‘So much?’ I asked weakly, afraid she was right.